“He was the only corner on (our) list at that time,” president Tim Ruskell said.

The Seahawks used a first-round choice on a cornerback for the second time in four years. They chose Marcus Trufant with the 11th overall pick in 2003.

Trufant moved to right cornerback last season. Jennings has started at left cornerback the past two years at Miami. It’s a pretty natural pairing, and Ruskell was asked if Jennings could get on the field right away.

“He could,” Ruskell said. “He has that kind of competitive attitude. He has that kind of football mentality and his instincts.”

The Seahawks chose defensive end Darryl Tapp in the second round with the 63rd overall choice. Tapp is from Virginia Tech. He is 6-1, and weighed more than 260 pounds at the end of the season but has dropped weight to 257 at the Senior Bowl and then to 252 pounds at the combine, but he is shorter than most teams want their defensive ends.

Jennings is 5 feet 11 and weighs 180 pounds, and while the assumption is that he will get a little bigger, he started 40 consecutive games at Miami.

The Seahawks picked second-to-last in the first round, waiting through 30 selections, five trades and nearly five hours. The secondary was seen as Seattle’s biggest need entering the draft and it was conveniently the deepest position in this year’s draft.

Six defensive backs were among the first 24 players chosen in the draft, and Ruskell said Seattle’s worry was that Chicago would choose Jennings with the 26th overall pick.

“It was a little nerve wracking,” Ruskell said. “We were afraid that the Bears – because of their need -- would take him.”

Chicago traded the 26th pick to Buffalo, which used it to select John McCargo. Five picks later, Jennings was a Seahawk. His reaction?

“I was kind of cool,” he said. “But everybody else, they were kind of having a fit out here.”

He watched the draft at the house of his older brother, Tony, in Orlando.

The book on Jennings? Make that books. Plural. He plowed through plenty of them earning two undergraduate degrees in his time at Miami.

Studying finance and business management aren’t going to help him on the NFL field, but it helps show the discipline and determination that made him the Seahawks’ first-round pick.

Jennings said he laid out the two-degree plan in 2001, his first year at Miami when he redshirted. He earned his degree in finance after three and a half years and when he decided to return for his senior season he knew he wouldn’t have enough time to complete a master’s degree, so he added a second undergraduate degree, which he earned in December.

A year ago, Seattle’s first-round draft pick was used on center Chris Spencer, a position no one expected. This year, the Seahawks not only picked a player at a position that was expected, they picked a player many people had predicted and one whose hallmark was his stability.

“Of all the corners, and I mean every one in this draft, he was the most consistent game to game,” Ruskell said. “It didn’t really matter what film you picked up, he was the same.”